Colloquia

Summary

Urban Area Development (UAD) projects are increasing in complexity due to a constantly changing environment, a growing number of diverse stakeholders, long-term uncertainty, and negotiation-driven decision-making. Systems Engineering (SE) has proven valuable in similarly complex sectors such as infrastructure, yet its application in UAD remains limited. Dutch Boosting Group (DBG), a consultancy specialised in applying SE in projects in the living environment, seeks to better align its approach with the needs of municipalities managing large-scale urban developments.

This research investigates where DBG’s current SE approach does not sufficiently align with the characteristics and challenges of UAD projects and develops a solution to improve its applicability in a municipal context. The Municipality of Hilversum, where DBG applies SE in the Sportpark project, served as a case study.

The research identifies four key challenges in UAD: complex stakeholder structures, difficulties in requirement formulation and decision-making, organisational fragmentation and knowledge loss, and long-term uncertainty combined with project dynamics. While SE offers potential for structuring complexity, supporting explicit decision-making, enabling interdisciplinary collaboration, and designing for flexibility, misalignments arise particularly in contexts of distributed land ownership, negotiable and evolving requirements, and the translation of qualitative ambitions into actionable and verifiable requirements.

To address these challenges, a Spatial System Map was developed. This interactive interface combines a zonal representation of the project area with integrated views of use cases, functions, requirements per zone and interface, the contractual or negotiable status of elements and requirements, and the physical layers. By visually linking spatial components to requirements and their degree of definition, the tool supports transparency, traceability, and shared understanding.

Testing within the municipality demonstrated appreciation for the visual integration of spatial and requirement-based information. Explicitly distinguishing between contractually fixed and negotiable requirements was perceived as particularly valuable. The Spatial System Map is therefore positioned as a means of bridging the gap between requirement-oriented Systems Engineering and the dynamic, negotiation-driven nature of planning practice.